When I agreed to speak about the "Future of Student Affairs" at Higher Ed Open Mic, I knew that I wanted to talk about three distinct topics: student affairs graduate programs, online-only students, and digital identity development. Those three areas are constantly pinging around my head. Attending multiple student affairs conferences and voraciously reading everything and anything that is related to higher education gives me ample cerebral material to digest and ponder.

Higher Ed Open Mic, an Eduventures-sponsored event, brings together an interesting mix of mostly Boston-based higher education professionals. I always love an event that offers up a new mix of speakers…fresh points of view offer up more to think about and provide (hopefully) refreshing rhetoric.

One of the best aspects of Higher Ed Open Mic is that all of the speakers have seven to ten minutes to make their points. That's it. Brevity rules the day…or the night in this case.

The future of student affairs concerns me greatly. Do we have too many graduate prep programs? Are we focused too much on a diminishing demographic of students? Are we too late to serve and support online-only students? Are our graduate programs weaving technology into their curricula? Are we cultivating innovation? What will give us some needed momentum?

So what's the best part about predicting the future of student affairs? Well, like most predictions, it's an idea, generated for discussion. Time will tell whether or not the mark has been missed or if accuracy was even slightly achieved.